When you’re stuck in the swamp of a midlife crisis, there’s generally only two ways out – back the way you came, or plunging further on. I’ve never been much good at U-turns, so earlier this year I chose the latter, jacking in life on land to move onto twenty tons of slowly rusting steel, otherwise known as a narrowboat. I’ll return to this small act of personal emancipation, but first I want to go back to 1985, the first night of my Freshers’ Week, and a second-year student I’ll call Monica Lee, sucking my toes.
Admittedly it was a brief experience. She was a rich kid from Singapore, and I doubt she thought much of the taste of my bush-boy nails. Anyway, it wasn’t so much the sex that was memorable, as the realisation that, probably for the first time, I was behaving with devil-may-care abandon in the pursuit of pleasure. Up until that point my life could be summed up by being compelled to live by the principles of AMDG (officially Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam, but we thought of it as All My Deeds for God) that I’d had to inscribe at the top of every page I turned in at school. “Work hard, play hard, pray hard,” my father implored, when after a year at home I climbed down from the tractor and headed off to Uni. He said nothing about shagging, which for him was synonymous with matrimonial procreation and thus not yet my concern. But there I was, on day one of the rest of my life, getting lucky and learning a thing or two about titillation.
As I soon discovered, on Australian campuses in the 1980s, hedonism went hand in hand with horrendous hairstyles. On weekends we’d head to the beach in our campervans and soft-tops, blasting INXS from our beatboxes and kidding ourselves we were on the road with Jack Kerouac. We glossed over his rejection of materialism in favour of Gordon Gekko’s maxim in Wall Street that “greed is good”, which was a much better match for our polo shirts and penny share portfolios. Despite a roller-coaster economy, a stock market crash (which took our penny shares with it) and being thrashed repeatedly by England in the cricket, it was hard not to feel positive: Australia was a big country ready to go large in a rapidly integrating world, just as things were getting exciting. As the decade drew to a close, China was flirting with the market, the Berlin Wall came down, and it was obvious the Soviets were toast. The Free World had prevailed, and things could only get, well, freer.
We mistakenly believed our laissez-faire lifestyles made a smashing blueprint for an equitable world
With the benefit of hindsight, the mistake we made was believing that our new laissez-faire lifestyles made a smashing blueprint for the creation of an equitable world. I’d call the next two decades of unbounded capitalism a “free-for-all” except that’s precisely the point – they weren’t liberating for everyone, just a few. A combination of financial deregulation, cheap capital and fewer trade barriers saw a staggering rise in the size of the world economy – but also in exploitation and wealth disparities, both between countries and within them. Wages grew, but worker security was shattered, and protections rolled back. As we ushered in the 21st century, there was incredible innovation, but along with it an amassing of colossal wealth and power by just a handful of people, especially the new tech barons. Most of the so-called wealth creation of those decades was simply the inflation of property prices, which soaked up the massive increase in both public and private debt and destroyed our children’s chances of owning their own homes. When the global financial crisis hit, much of what had seemed like economic and social progress unravelled, and the liberal world order has since all but been crushed by rising energy and commodity prices, resurgent inflation and renewed hostility between superpowers. And that’s just the human impact of manmade woes. Nature and wildlife have also suffered grievously as we continue to pollute and plunder, destroy habitats, and drive thousands of species to extinction.
So while our more conservative forebears came down on the wrong side of the costs vs benefits equation of a healthy sexual self-education, at least they hadn’t forgotten the Aristotelian tenet that individual freedom ultimately rests on its exercise in service to the common good. Soon after I moved onto the canal and became a “continuous cruiser”, a mishap left me stranded midstream as night fell. A fellow boater, on his way up the towpath to the pub, didn’t hesitate to turn back to his boat and reverse it up in the dark so he could pull mine to safety. No doubt like me, my rescuer had gone off-grid in search of a less-burdensome life. And perhaps like me he sometimes sits on his deck at dawn, nursing a coffee as he watches the mallards and moorhens, imagining himself as a modern-day Henry David Thoreau (although I doubt Walden had the benefit of an incinerator loo and 400 amperes of lithium power). But for all its sense of rugged individualism, I’ve learnt that living on the canal also means being part of a community that takes care of its own: where the freedom of one relies on the freedom of all.
Peter Phelps is founder and publisher of Perspective
